The One Before The Road Trip Across Australia

I grew up in Sydney, Australia - a relatively small city compared to London and New York, but a city embossed in haste nonetheless. I spent most of my childhood and adult life in Sydney until the age of twenty-eight when my Saturn return sent me on a trajectory that involved venturing across oceans and seas to learn more about the big wide world and, ultimately, learn more about myself. Since then, I’ve probably spent more time away from Sydney than in it, but every time I return it evokes a deeply familiar feeling - the feeling of knowing somewhere for a very long time.

At first, it’s the smell of the flora - the gum and eucalyptus trees, the bottle brush and banksia. Then, it's the birdsong - the carolling song of the magpies, the gawking of the yellow-crested cockatoos, the melodic whistles of the honeyeaters. In Australia, I can feel the aliveness of a land that existed long before I came here; a land of ancient spirit.

I’d returned, once again, from my journey abroad like a determined young lady who left a country town to become a star in the big city and didn’t quite make it - at least, on the outside. I’d learned that most of what happens when we journey abroad or leave the confines of our comfort zones for a life less ordinary happens on the inside. It’s the soul’s internal evolution, unfolding beneath what is visible to the naked eye. I returned to Australia last December an evolved version of me. After my time in South America sitting with plant medicines, I knew my life would never be the same - is it ever really the same?

Each time I return to Australia - no matter the life-changing experiences I have along the journey - the (figurative) landing is a little different. The jet lag was tougher this time. The change of environment set my skin into hyperdrive and I was left dealing with chronic eczema for a few months. I felt the energy in Sydney to be quite unsettled. I knew the economic crisis was impacting people. It seemed the Great Australian Dream was now The Great Australian Nightmare as citizens juggled high mortgages, inflation and a rental crisis. It was a reminder of the life I actively endeavoured to alter for myself; a reminder that I no longer wanted to have any ties to this city, or its haste. And that became my deepest intention this time - to cut any ties I had to a future in Sydney. I wanted to finish the job. This back-and-forth between Sydney and I had gone on long enough. It was time to close this chapter of my identity, to really close it.

I started by getting rid of all of the unnecessary belongings that lay scattered around the way: boxes in my family’s garage, shoes on top of a wardrobe in my sister's house, clothes I don’t wear anymore, a mortgaged apartment… … Yes, I too fell for the Great Australian Nightmare and had been paying my dues to the bank for the last decade. I bought that apartment when I sat miserably in a corporate office, unbeknownst to me how absurd it was I worked sixty hours a week in a job I despised for a company that couldn’t care less about my wellbeing. I thought buying an apartment and having a mortgage was a security deposit for a better future. I thought that one day, at the ripe old age of sixty-five, I’d have my very own red-brick shoe box in the sky. What was I thinking? Turns out, I was duped. Sometime in the last few years I realised I wasn’t waiting until sixty-five. Life was now, right here in this very moment. That mortgage didn’t give me security, it gave me stress and anxiety. In all my years of “owning” it, I never paid any of it off. The interest was always too high and I preferred to spend my salary living - not making banks richer. I wonder what the sixty-five-year-old version of me would think about that when she looked back on the life we’d lived? I bet she’d be happy. It’s been so amazing - so incredibly wonderful.

With hindsight, I thought I was doing everyone proud. I had my auntie’s stern words echoing in my mind “Property will always go up. It’s the best investment for the future.” I guess she never foresaw a global pandemic, two wars and an economic crisis.

I just think this whole set-yourself-up-for-retirement-worry-about-the-future narrative has had its time. Goodness knows if we’ll ever bloody see a future at this rate (apologies for the pessimism) - at least not a future that looks like the world today. I can’t help but feel that the colonialist, capitalist, consumerist empire is falling - as all empires do. I remember, a few times while I had the mortgage, I thought to myself how unethical it was that I “owned” an apartment and rented it out to someone else to pay the bank back the money I owed. It felt very colonialist - just one more example of how the system perpetuates hierarchy. And I was a part of it; me and my privilege.

I read in a post today that ‘supremacy is poison,’ and with everything that’s going on in the world - as I helplessly watch innocent civilians murdered in a genocide, wars raging on, inequality separating the have’s and the have-not’s, - I see how supremacy is poison, and how so much of the foundations of this world have been built upon on the model of supremacy, including the land I stand on. Call me a dreamer, but there has to be another way. There has to be.

There is a great spirit in the land of Australia. It never died, surviving the greatest catastrophe known to the First Nations people who looked after this country for tens of thousands of years before the colonialists arrived. I feel that spirit when I step out of the city and into the bush, beneath the red gums and the eucalyptus trees. First Nations people have always had a special connection to this great spirit. It lives on in their lore, their dreamtime stories. It makes up the essence of who they are. I wonder what my life would have been like had I been taught such celestial knowledge; had I known from a young age about the connection I had to the land I walked upon. Perhaps I did know. Sometimes I wonder why I was born here. What cosmic intervention decided this would be the land I grew up on?

Despite my disconnect from Sydney and its collective ​​commotion, there is still an innate essence of my soul that feels tethered to Australia. It seems to get stronger as I age and my wisdom overpowers some of the nonsensical rhetoric I absorbed as a child and young adult. That part of my soul calls to the spirit of Australia, and sometimes it calls back to me, like a graceful echo, a distant cooee flying with the winds.

I’d never planned for this road trip to be a minor initiation, but it turned out to be. I would travel across south-eastern Australia, for seven days in a 2005 Nissan Xtrail I named Xander. I would camp alone for the first time in my life. I would meet closely with the spirits, and hear them speaking to me. I would feel wild again, with my bare feet on the Earth, remembering my connection to Country.